Our openness is official: The Open Telekom Cloud fulfills the compatibility standards according to the official regulations (2017.09) of the OpenStack Foundation. The public cloud offering from Deutsche Telekom has been completely certified, meaning it can immediately use the title “OpenStack Powered Platform.” This allows users to know that a cloud offering is compatible with other services based on OpenStack. The Open Telekom Cloud is now also listed on the OpenStack Marketplace.

In order to become certified, providers have to ensure all basic functionality – the Compute, Network, Storage, Images and User Management services – has interfaces conforming to the same standards. Moreover, they have to prove that they use unaltered OpenStack code in certain areas; so-called designated code sections.

Telekom met the requirements for the complete platform certification with the current release for the Open Telekom Cloud in March. Among other changes for the Open Telekom Cloud, a self-developed Object Storage variant based on the S3 standard was joined by OpenStack SWIFT based on the OpenStack standard.

In total, the Open Telekom Cloud had to pass 239 separate infrastructure as a service (IaaS) tests to fulfill the compatibility standards of the OpenStack Foundation. “They are very technically demanding, but also extremely important to do,” says Kurt Garloff, Chief Architect for OpenStack at T-Systems. “Now we have the official proof that the Open Telekom Cloud complies with the standardized requirements. Users can profit from the best possible scalability and synergy effects with automation tools based on these standards.”

The Open Telekom Cloud’s test results for compatibility are publicly available on the OpenStack Foundation’s website – exactly in the spirit of transparency promoted by OpenStack. In order to ensure this compatibility in the future with other OpenStack-based clouds, Deutsche Telekom will administer ongoing automated tests on its own.

The new certification of adherence to the OpenStack Foundation’s standards is yet another sign of Telekom’s commitment to the OpenStack community. The German provider became a Gold member of the OpenStack Foundation some time ago and is also represented on the supervisory board of the organization. “As an active member of the community, the compatibility of OpenStack solutions is very important to us,” says Frank Strecker, who is responsible for Telekom’s cloud business. “That’s why we intensively support the InterOp Working Group with collaborative work, public speaking and, of course, with our own OpenStack cloud, the Open Telekom Cloud, which we are constantly developing according to the standards of the Foundation with the community in mind. So we are very pleased with this latest certification.”